Alma Katsu - The Descent

That meant he’d been on his own on the island for nearly four years, if the girls had joined him only recently. “Weren’t you lonely?”

“No, not really. I needed the solitude. I needed to understand myself better and I wouldn’t have been able to do that surrounded by others.” He turned back to the fortress and we started to wander inland again. “What about you?” he asked. “What did you do after you left Garda?”

The wind was at our backs now and blew my hair over my shoulders and into my face and I had to brush strands out of my eyes. “Do you remember, when you’d finally caught up with me, the man who came to my rescue?”

“The doctor. Of course I remember him. I almost killed him.”

“His name was Luke. You made me try to send him away so we would be together, you and I. But I’d already told him about you, and he didn’t believe that I’d stay with you freely and refused to go. So you made him forget me, took away all his memories of me.” Adair had made that part of my punishment for betraying him, for walling him up and leaving him entombed for two hundred years. He’d meant to strip me of everything, property, freedom—but especially love, the love of the man who had given up everything for me.

In the end, however, Adair couldn’t go through with it. When he saw that I’d never come to love him as his prisoner, he set me free and told me to go after Luke. To find him and tell him who I was and what we had meant to each other. “I knew he’d go back to be near his daughters,” I said, “and that’s where I found him. I begged him to remember me. And because it was meant to be—just as you said—he listened, and he forgave me.”

Adair flinched. “So, you have been with him the whole time we’ve been apart. And was it as you hoped? Were you happy together?”

I bowed my head. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he should know the truth. “We were happy, yes.”

He started to turn away from me. “So why have you come here—”

“Luke died a few months ago,” I said, cutting him off. “It happened very quickly. When he took me back, we ended up living near his former wife so he could spend time with his daughters. He was practicing medicine again, and we’d just gotten the house remodeled the way we wanted.” The words spilled out though I hadn’t planned to tell Adair these details. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. I suppose it was because I’d had no one else to tell. “The illness came on very suddenly. He went into the hospital and never came out. First there were tests, round after round, until they found the problem. A brain tumor.” I swallowed and stared at my feet. “His doctors argued whether it was operable or not, but by then it was too late. Everything started to fail: memory, speech, vision. He had seizures. It was hard to watch.” And hard to relive now in the retelling.

Adair stared at me intently. “I am sorry.”

“I stayed in the house for a while. I’d gotten close to his daughters and his ex-wife. They’ve been nice to me, but I think they were beginning to wonder why I was still hanging around. After all, Luke was my only connection to the area. Aside from the three of them, I had no one else, no friends. I’m sure it seemed odd to them, based on what they knew of my past life. They thought it was so glamorous, the home in Paris, all the travel, and after Luke died, I think they expected me to go back to it.” Adair knew, however, that my Paris house was gone: he’d burned it to the ground when he’d been trying to find me, to flush me out, to burn everything I owned as part of my punishment for what I’d done to him.

“So, your man is gone and you’ve come to see me,” Adair said. There was a tiny uptick in his tone, a hint of expectation.

“It’s not like that. I’m not ready to be with anyone yet,” I rushed to tell him, wanting to be honest with him. Believing that I was being honest. I was still raw from Luke’s passing. It had been only a few months.

Oh, but it was the wrong thing to say to Adair. His face crumpled a bit, and I felt his mood deflate, almost unperceivably. He took a moment to compose himself. “Then why are you here? Don’t play games with me, Lanore—why did you come looking for me?”

His questions set my heart pounding hard in my chest. The time had come to tell him, to throw myself on his mercy. It felt too soon; I’d expected that we would’ve spent more time catching up, that I’d have a better chance to see where I stood with him, to find out if he’d forgiven me for breaking his heart. I couldn’t risk that he’d refuse me. I needed him. He was the only one who would be able to help me get to the cause of the nightmares.

The goats chose that moment to come over, staring at us as though they’d never seen humans before. The one with the huge set of horns snorted under his breath as though making up his mind about something, but he didn’t run away when I petted his shaggy head.

“You’re right.” I dropped my gaze, cowardly. “I’ve come for a reason. There is something I need to ask you to do for me, Adair.”

Before I could utter another word, however, we were hit by a sudden gust of cold air. A huge dark cloud was sweeping toward us from the sea. It unfurled across the entire horizon, black thunderheads roiling like a cauldron at full boil, lightning bursts blinking deep within the gray swells. A heavy sheet of rain dropped from the sky and swept across the waves, heading in our direction. I’d never seen a storm break so swiftly, especially one that size.

“That looks dangerous,” I said, pointing to the sky. “We’ll have to go in.”

“It’s nothing to be worried about. We get weather like this all the time.” Adair tried to sound nonplussed, but I noticed that, for some unknown reason, he seemed to be looking at the dark clouds with suspicion. The first huge gust rolled in off the water, sending the goats running for the shelter of the pine trees. Adair placed a hand on my back to gently guide me to the house. As we approached the French doors off the dining room, I saw the two women silhouetted in the yellow light watching for our return, the brunette twitching with impatience. As we stepped through the door, the downpour started behind us in earnest.

I brushed my windblown hair back into place while Adair bolted the door. The women glared at him. “We wondered where you were. You’d been gone so long,” Robin said to Adair in a whiny child’s voice.

“Quite a storm out there, wouldn’t you say? And strange that it came on us so quickly,” Adair said under a furrowed brow. He seemed to be probing for something.

“That’s how it is here, on the water,” Terry replied breezily. Of the pair, she was the bold one, the one who would stand up to Adair. “Good thing you came in. Winds could blow someone as small as her right over a cliff,” she said, nodding coolly at me.

Robin took Adair’s hand and began to tug him toward the stairs. “C’mon, Adair, say good night to your guest. She must be tired after all that traveling,” she said, though plainly it wouldn’t matter to her if I keeled over from exhaustion at that very second. Adair opened his mouth to protest, but I shook my head.

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “Robin’s right. It’s been quite a day, what with the travel and all. We can finish catching up tomorrow.” I needed time, anyway, to make sense of the strange situation in which I’d found him.

Adair capitulated, tucking the blonde under his left arm and the brunette under his right. Thusly propped up, he turned away from me. “I guess this is good night, then. We’ll see you in the morning.” I watched them walk away, three abreast, the girls’ hips swaying as they climbed the stairs.